If loggerheads are coming back, are more protections needed?

Sunday

Aug 18, 2013 at 12:22 AM

Some local officials question the need for more – potentially costly – measures to protect the sea creatures.

By Kate Elizabeth QueramKate.Queram@StarNewsOnline.com

When the federal government recently designated 68 miles of Cape Fear region coastline as critical habitat for loggerhead sea turtles, some local officials questioned the need for more – potentially costly – protections. Carolina Beach Mayor Bob Lewis thinks the volunteer groups that help protect turtles may be sufficient. A large grass-roots effort in Pleasure Island, after all, has done "a great job" of protecting nesting turtles, he pointed out during a public hearing. This year's nesting season is already the busiest ever recorded in the state, suggesting that the existing measures are beginning to pay off.So the proposed regulation, required under the Endangered Species Act, raises the question: How much does the species have to rebound before being taken off the endangered list?It's a difficult one to answer. Unlike endangered fish, federal recovery plans for sea turtles don't rely on increasing population counts to determine whether a species has rebounded. According to local experts, that's at least partially because counting the number of turtles in the ocean isn't as straightforward as it sounds."Based on what people on the water tell me, there is an increase in young turtles, but that doesn't mean a population recovery," said Jean Beasley, founder of the Karen Beasley Sea Turtle Rescue and Rehabilitation Center on Topsail Island. "Loggerheads and green turtles, which are our two major species in North Carolina, are not sexually mature until they're about 35 years old, so those young turtles have to grow up. And these turtles can get in the Atlantic gyre and travel all the way around the hemisphere, so how the heck can anybody assess populations? It is a very, very difficult question to measure."

Sea turtles have been protected under the Endangered Species Act since 1973, and were considered a threatened species prior to that. In North Carolina, loggerheads are the primary nesting species, though green and Kemp's ridley turtles occasionally lay eggs on state beaches as well.Since being placed under a recovery plan – requiring, among other things, that the number of turtle eggs lost to predators does not exceed 10 percent – the number of nesting turtles in the state has increased. This year marks the busiest nesting season on record in North Carolina, with 1,216 nests as of Thursday, a 7 percent increase over the previous record of 1,140, set in 1999. It is progress – in 2009, there were just 614 nests in the state – but it's a far cry from the recovery plan requirements, which call for an average of 2,000 nests per season. This summer also marks the fourth consecutive year that state nest totals have increased, but experts said that trend isn't significant enough to draw any long-term conclusions. "I don't think anybody who studies sea turtles would say that nest data over four years would say one way or other," said Matthew Godfrey, sea turtle biologist with the N.C. Wildlife Resources Commission. "There are up and down years. You need to do a statistical analysis, and based on past analyses up to last year, there just isn't a statistical trend in the numbers. There's a lot of variability."To come up with a credible population estimate, researchers would need at least three decades of comprehensive nesting data, Godfrey said. State officials have nesting records dating as far back as the 1980s, but monitoring wasn't standardized in North Carolina until about 1995, giving biologists less than 20 years of reliable data to work with. The longer time span allows young turtles to reach sexual maturity and begin laying eggs, which is one of the only surefire ways to know definitively if conservation efforts are working."It is so important to get those older animals to be contributing to the population," Beasley said. "That's what's going to get us there and stabilize population numbers."Still, there's at least some anecdotal evidence that the number of sea turtles in coastal waters is greater than it used to be. Fishermen, spending the majority of their waking hours on the water, have said for years that more and more sea turtles are swimming off the North Carolina coast.

"A lot of fishermen claim that they see more turtles now than they have in the past, and I don't doubt that," said Chris Batsavage, protected resources section chief for the N.C. Division of Marine Fisheries. "But it's hard to put any numbers to that. It appears that the conservation measures that have been in place for turtles are working, but to say for sure that there's many more compared to 20 years ago – that's speculation."Watermen are required to comply with multiple regulations designed to protect the reptiles, so they may simply be more aware of the turtles than the average beachgoer. Most recently, Marine Fisheries officials shut down the large-mesh gillnet fishery from the N.C. 58 bridge to the South Carolina border after sea turtles became entangled in the nets. That precaution is in addition to shortened hours for the fishery, which allow fishermen to set their nets for about 12 hours per day."Most of the turtles under the management measures in place are alive when they're found in the nets," Batsavage said. "The nets can only be set an hour before sunset, and must be out of the water one hour after sunrise. That's greatly increased the survival rate."Fishing advocates and watermen have long questioned the logic of adding regulations to protect a species that seems to be rebounding, particularly since the existing precautions – notably, the implementation of turtle-excluder devices on shrimp trawls – seems to be working."It just makes sense that if they're not being harmed by shrimp trawls – and they're not – then obviously you're going to have less mortality," said John Broome, a commercial shrimper based in Carolina Beach. "They're going to be thriving."Local beach town officials have their doubts about the wisdom of adding protections. At a hearing this month about the proposed critical habitat designation, some said the potential effects on beach nourishment projects could be devastating, both to local economies and the loggerheads the rule is aiming to protect."Turtles need sand. If critical habitat is designated for loggerhead turtles, these existing, successful programs will be burdened with additional and unnecessary measures, and will become more costly and difficult to implement," said Harry Simmons, mayor of Caswell Beach and a member of the state's Coastal Resources Commission.The answer, Godfrey said, is simply that the turtles remain a protected species under a federal recovery plan. Until that changes, protective measures can, and probably will, continue to be put in place."Until they come off, they are subject to protection," he said. "The recovery plan has specific benchmarks, explaining what the federal government believes constitutes recovery. Until it meets that criteria, the species will still be listed."

Kate Elizabeth Queram: 343-2217On Twitter: @kate_goes_bleu

As required by the federal recovery plan for loggerhead sea turtles:No more than 10 percent of eggs lost to predators.No more than 10 percent of all hatchlings disoriented or misdirected by artificial lighting.Minimal turtle bycatch in shrimp, pot/trap, dredge and gillnet fisheries.At least 14,000 nests per year in the northern recovery zone – 2,000 in North Carolina, 9,200 in South Carolina and 2,800 in Georgia.Increasing nest numbers have to correlate with increasing numbers of nesting females.